One must not forget that both Sri Aurobindo an the
Mother were very aware of the social context of yoga. Sri Aurobindo can be
considered a social philosopher with the development of conditions propitious
to the emergence of consciousness being at the base of his social thought. The
same can be said for the Mother in the practical formulation of Auroville.
However, as part of the modernist discourse within which they articulated their
ideas, the social, cultural and psychological were separated, so that yoga
became articulated outside of its social/cultural conditions purely in terms of
psychology.

A postmodern discourse has problematized this
exclusive differentiation, since particularly in our times when modernity has
entered its global chapter, to think psychology in isolation from social and
cultural realities is to blind oneself from social/cultural/historical
inscription of discourses on human subjectivity and even anatomy (after all the
body is a structure of consciousness). We live in a world saturated with
economic and political power. In such a world, we may seek to find a “purity”
of collective existence by taking shelter in ashrams or Aurovilles where we
seem to be absolved of the need for thinking of these things because someone
else has provided the sheltered social conditions. Or we may act as if such
conditions are irrelevant to yoga by wishing them away in favor of a purity of
psychological concern. However, in the present rapidly uniformalizing phase of
neo-liberal globalization, the Hegelian end-of-history, there is no “inside”
whether social or psychological which is immune from the determination of this
fundamentally political regime. I am convinced that both Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother were very conscious of this and that their personal yoga through their
acts of personal consciousness, was also a micropolitics. The scope of this
micropolitics, in their case, was in fact hardly micro and is better seen as a
macropolitics. Nevertheless, what I am saying is that there is a different way
of perceiving the yoga, which does not isolate it from its dynamic entanglement
with the forces of world politics and thus enables its action not only as a
psychological “progress of consciousness” but as a being-in-the-world in the
micropolitical sense. This is one way to understand the statement of Sri Aurobindo,
“All Life is Yoga.”

One sees a good example of this active today in the
increasingly overt politicization of the ashram. I see this as the inability to
see yoga simultaneously as social/cultural/psychological. The continuing denial
of their intimate braiding has lead on the one hand to a rupture of the yoga in
its alignment with extreme right wing politics and on the other to the willed
refusal of the ostrich.

What is the yoga of self-perfection but an ethics
(will-to-right) and aesthetics (will-to-beauty) of self-fashioning? As one
aspect of the Record, Sri Aurobindo was literally engaged in aesthetic
self-fashioning since a siddhi of the sharira chatusthaya (quartet of the body)
is saundarya (beauty). He understood this term in many ways, including the
shaping of his body parts into the image of the perfection of an archetype.

In the Foucauldian sense, an aesthetics of the self
through disciplines of truth telling is a goal which can be thought of as an
alignment with the Nietzschean project of overmanhood. Reading Nietzsche
closely, one finds his overman as that being which exceeds environmental
determinations through the power of creativity. This requires first a
consciousness of the forces within and without which subject us. Freedom from
subjection is the condition for the exercise of psychic and spiritual forces of
self-perfection. The disciplines of truth telling help us to disentangle
ourselves from the compromised life to which we have acceded through our
weaknesses. It thereby strengthens that which is autonomous in us and its
creative power, to refashion ourselves in the image of beauty (saundarya), an
aesthetics of the self.

As I said earlier, there are many descriptions of
the Integral Yoga which Sri Aurobindo held simultaneously, and “an aesthetics
of the self” leading to the image of Beauty, I believe, is one such description.

SA in his language practice privileges the One over
the Many, leading to misunderstandings, imo. Because a close reading makes it
clear that the Integral is radically One and radically Infinite. This cannot be
logically comprehended and any attempt to language it leads to difficulties.
Deleuze’s Univocity, for example, which he characterizes by the formula Monism
= Pluralism, can be misunderstood, as a kind of unity as Badiou has done, or
even translated in Vedantic terms to a visistadvaita (qualified non-dualism) of
the Ramanuja school, where one cannot know the One-in-itself, but the
One-as-difference. According to SA’s integrality, this is one poise of the
supermind, the other two being those of the One-in-itself and the
Different-Ones. One may call these Radical Monism, Monism = Pluralism and
radical Pluralism. To mind, there will always be the game of musical chairs
between these three contenders without any conclusion. But it is important to
empower each of these if one is to think the unthought within thought or aspire
for that which is logically unthinkable.

Similarly a just, equitable, transparent and open
social and political structure with minimum of hierarchy and a maximum of free
and direct interaction between people, driven by a feeling of equality,
comradeship and fraternity, releases a vast amount of energy in the work-life.

Liberty, equality and fraternity
are some of the eternal and universal human values and they are part of the
highest evolutionary destiny of humanity. So all creative and sincere attempt
to realise these values in the human life, brings in the supportive sanction
and energies of universal Nature. So an important part of the effort for
progress is to strive for a pragmatic manifestation of liberty, equality and
fraternity in the outer life of the organisation or the community or in other
words towards a more and more free, equitable and fraternal corporate life. The author is a Research Associate at Sri
Aurobindo Society and on the editorial board of Fourth Dimension Inc. His major
areas of interest are Management and Indian Culture.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

As Talcott Parsons’s beloved student at the
Department of Social Relations at Harvard in the 1950s, Bellah was subject to
high expectations… From the point of view of the sociology of ideas, this
strategy might be seen as both a homage to a venerable sociological
tradition—going all the way back to Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer and the
incredibly vast array of interests of 19th-century sociology—and as an attempt
to bring Talcott Parsons’s work to a higher level of complexity and explicative
power. Many may not know, but Parsons was a biology major and remained a
voracious reader all his life, eager to make almost everything fit inside his
signature “theory of social action.” …

Luhmann’s, as well as Bellah’s, silence about
historical change in general should not be mistaken for lack
of scholarship or courage: on the contrary, it comes from a lucid understanding
of the promises and the limits of theory vis-à-vis the study
of individual historical facts and processes that takes Parsons’s tendency to
over-theorize seriously and tries to find a way to transcend its shortcomings.

The story of Robert Bellah and Religion in
Human Evolution can thus be told as the quest a hero had to bring to
an end against all odds and impediments, and as the dutiful effort of a
metaphorical son to resume and further the work of his metaphorical father
within a long line of ancestors—even putting the clear Weberian inspiration
aside, Bellah’s decision to go back to pre-axial and axial-age civilizations
after a life of work on modernity and modernization might be read as parallel
to Durkheim’s decision to focus on Australian aboriginals after The
Division of Labor in Society and Suicide, a
choice that Bellah himself once interpreted as a journey into the unconscious
sources of social existence analogous to Freud’s work on dreams…

I would make a fool of myself by saying that the
main thrust beyond Bellah’s latest work is the resentment of the unappreciated
intellectual. No need to call Nietzsche into question: I am just saying that
besides the aspiration to bring his self-assigned life plan of research to an
end, Bellah might have had another, all too human, desire to fulfill.

Perhaps more importantly the author does not write
to simply address followers of Sri Aurobindo but has done an even greater
service by attempting to make the Record available to a wider audience by
drawing comparisons with the work of several of the most renown philosophers of
the late 20th Century including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and
especially Gilles Deleuze who figures most prominently in his analysis of the
Record of Yoga.

Contemporary philosophy or theory is now in a
post-metaphysical stage given the myriad of problems associated with ideologies
that have been spun from worn out metaphysical creeds throughout the 20th
century. It is a stroke of genius to analyze Sri Aurobindo’s yoga by employing
the language of Gilles Deleuze because of its relevance to contemporary
thought. Given the fact that The Record of Yoga and Sri Aurobindo’s many other
important texts were written close to 1o0 years ago and thus are cloaked in the
language of metaphysical idealism, that although appropriate for the times, now
represent a discourse largely removed from the necessities of our
Post-Metaphysical Age, Banerji has performed an invaluable service for
contemporary scholars, theologians as well as followers of integral yoga.
Because of the seemingly incommensurable discursive gap between Aurobindo and
Deleuze one would never gleam the similarities if someone as skilled as Banerji
has not attempted his comparison.

Reading them today I can not help to smile because
language – as we know from Future Poetry – charts the leading edge of our
evolutionary turn. So for example to read these words in the 21st century well
after the intuitive poetic vision that inspired their first utterance has
passed, I can only wonder what the signifier psychicization differs and defers
to? If one takes SA seriously about the infinite expressive potentialities of
the Divine then one would be real surprised if this did not also correspond to
an equally expressive ever-evolving language.

Therefore it seems to me rather unlikely that what
Sri Aurobindo may have first gleamed in language from an intuitive vision over
75 years ago would in fact be the very same language he would cloak his “guru english” in today.
Over time sublime experience becomes reified in language, inspirational poetry
quickly becomes stale ideology. While one can memorize his system and learn to
parrot Sri Aurobindo’s words mapping his experience onto the countless
differences that shape the experiences and inner topography of each one of us
is a whole other enchilada.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Throughout the world there is an unmistakable trend
of common people rising up against their autocratic overlords and tyrants. No
doubt there is a Divine decree that has gone forth that is behind this rapid
overturning of all dictatorships and the breakdown of political thuggery.

If the Ashram is a microcosm of the world and what
happens in it is a representative of the world outside, then the Divine Will,
as it manifests in the world, is also an indicator of what It seeks to achieve
in the Ashram as well. The writing is on the wall for all to see.

This issue can only be resolved if the average
Ashramite stands up and quietly, but firmly, rejects the stifling apparatus of
unaccountable and non-transparent autocracy propped up by falsehood,
intimidation and bribery, which the current management has foisted on them and
now seeks to legitimize in the name of the Mother, specifically by recourse to
the Trust Deed.

The true friends of the Ashram, as well as of the
trustees themselves, are those that speak out and call a halt to the suicidal
downward slide on which the collective has been accelerating under their
reckless and negligent misrule. A positive outcome of the current crisis in the
Ashram will surely constitute the next step in a virtuous cycle of more
transparent and better accountable governance of people throughout the world. Reply

Robert Wilkinson is misinformed when he says the Ashram
Archives "lists Heehs as one of its founding member". He is merely
repeating Heehs' false claim. In fact Heehs was originally one of 40
proof-readers of the SABCL publication unconnected with the Archives when it
was started. The Mother blessed two young men as the first researchers at the
Archives founded by Jayantilal Parekh. Heehs was nowhere in the picture. Since
Jayantilal headed both projects (Archives and SABCL), eventually after 1973 the
proof-reading group was folded into the already existent Archives. That is how
Heehs came to join the Archives as a proof-reader. By that time, the actual
researchers at the Archives (approved by the Mother) were already at work for
over two years

With a little bit of luckVancouver
Sun By DOUGLAS TODD, Vancouver Sun March
16, 2012 Is life just random chance? Or is it pre-determined, either by God or
by the inexorable laws of a mechanistic universe?

Going a bit further than O’Driscoll, some
spiritually inclined philosophers – such as Sri Aurobindo from India and
Hartshorne and others from North America – have taken to heart that the
universe is continually evolving.In the world’s process of becoming, they say
that “God” is basically the natural force that draws order out of chaos, out of
randomness. Like Aristotle, 20th-century philosophers and
scientists such as Charles Peirce, David Böhm and Robert Kane are convinced
there is more than spontaneity, accident or blind luck. There is also an
organizing principle. As Hartshorne put it, “Neither pure chance nor the
pure absence of chance can explain the universe.”

Even while rejecting the notion of an all-controlling
Designer of the Universe, Anglo-American physicist Paul Davies said new
“post-modern” science reveals that “an ordered universe is more than a gigantic
accident.” It contains purpose. The late Australian microbiologist Charles Birch
said it this way: “The post-modern discourse is that chance and purpose can
live together. Indeed, one is not possible without the other.”

Not absolutely everything is predetermined by cause
and effect, Birch says. Humans, and other sentient creatures, have some degree
of real free choice. In other words, randomness and directivity are
complementary. In life, especially in humans, Birch maintains there
is a fundamental “urge to live,” to “anticipate,” to seek “realistic hope.” The
creative power of the future, which some call “eros,” influences the world to
move toward greater richness of experience. Whether or not most people accept such cosmological
speculation about the evolutionary process, such ideas about inherent
purposefulness in the universe seem to back up David Foster Wallace when he
said, “I wish you more than luck.”

Poetry is the spiritual excitement of a rhythmic
voyage of self-discovery among the magic islands of form and name in these
inner and outer worlds. ~ Sri Aurobindo

In his poem, “Lines on Ireland”,
composed in 1896, Sri Aurobindo exclaims at the fall of Ireland:

How changed, how fallen from her ancient spirit!/
She that was Ireland, Ireland now no more,/ In beggar’s weeds behold
at England’s
door ...”

The seeds of fervent nationalism or patriotism,
which were to blossom over the coming decades, could be traced to his poem on Ireland. Sri
Aurobindo’s prescription for Irish redemption, was not a military strategy but
a return to its roots, self-introspection, deeper spiritual communion, revival
of its past glory and distinctive cultural identity. For the subjugation and
subservience of Ireland,
he doesn’t accuse the alien power but blames the enslaved state:

But thou to thine own self disloyal, hast/ Renounced
the help divine, turning thy past/ To idle legends and fierce tales of blood,/
Mere violent wrath with no proposed good.

The poet’s attack culminates in the line which
emphatically asserts:

How fallen art thou being ruled by these!

His personal frustration is a spontaneous
condemnation of a shameless surrender to foreign domination. As Shyam Kumari
rightly observes in the critical essay “The Spirit of Indian Nationalism in Sri
Aurobindo’s Early Poems”:

“It is a sweet journey to follow in the footsteps of
Sri Aurobindo’s early poetry and trace the first dawn of the Indian spirit.”

Sri Aurobindo’s entrapment in an alien culture did
not impede his quest for search of the traditional roots of Indian heritage.
His stress was on spiritual regeneration and rediscovery of the cultural roots
for an emphatic assertion of nationalist identity. Sri Aurobindo was influenced by Bankim Chandra
Chattopadhyay, who fused spirituality with nationalism in Anandamath. He
advocated a confrontational path for the sanyasis as their means of liberation
or nirvana.

Patriotism or nationalism is not alienated from spirituality. Cultural
self-discovery, especially the rekindling of inherent tradition and heritage,
has a sacramental dimension. The sanctity of the latter has to be preserved
against all odds. This is at the root of the spiritual resilience of a
nation against external subjugation. It is this spiritual empathy that Sri
Aurobindo celebrated when he described the novelist in his poem entitled
“Bankim Chandra Chatterji” as “The sweetest voice that ever spoke in prose.” In
his obituary lyric “Saraswati with the Lotus”, he evokes the muse of learning
and bemoans the sad demise of the author:

Thy tears fall fast, O Mother, on its bloom,/ O white-armed mother, like honey
fall thy tears;/ Yet even their sweetness can no more relume/ The golden light,
the fragrance heaven rears,/ The fragrance and the light for ever shed/ Upon
his lips immortal who is dead.

Spiritual heritage and individuality are intrinsic
to national identity. Sri Aurobindo started from this point and made
spirituality and nationalism concomitant like a glorious and invincible union
of the Ganga and Jamuna, thereby upholding the
sacred past and the “mighty godhead of Sanatana Dharma”. It is this spirit that
is echoed in the celebration of the sacrifice of the Irish nationalist, Charles
Stewart Parnell (1891):

O pale and guiding light.../ Thou too wert then a
child of tragic earth,/ Since vainly filled the luminous doom of birth.

Sri Aurobindo’s identification with Parnell and
correlation of India with Ireland
is distinctly clear in the following lines:

Deliverer lately hailed, since by our lords/ Most
feared, most hated, hated because feared,/ Who smot’st them with an edge
surpassing swords!

These early poems testify that Sri Aurobindo was
searching for an apt metaphor for his own Mother India. The general refrain in
most of these lyrics is a clarion call to regain the lost pride and glory,
which would pave the path for liberation from alien rule. Behind the guise of Ireland, Sri
Aurobindo revealed his concern for his own country. The mask however lies
uncovered, though in a different context altogether, in the poem “Night by the
Sea”:

Having resurrected the faith in his roots he became
acutely conscious of how he “had wronged” his “youth and nobler powers” by
“weak attempts, small failures, wasted hours”. The call for homeland and its
freedom is distinct and resonant.
CR Das once described Sri Aurobindo as “the poet of patriotism, as the prophet
of nationalism and the lover of humanity”. Among the poems that express his
sense of nationalism and quest for liberty, the most notable is “Baji Prabhu”,
a long narrative poem that eulogises the fortitude and valour of the Maratha
warrior against the Mughals.

Inflicted. And from time to time the gaze/ Of Baji sought the ever-sinking
sun./ Men fixed their eyes on him and in his firm/ Expression lived. So the
slow minutes passed.

The poem marks a remarkable blend of form and content.
Sri Aurobindo’s “Vadula”, first published under the title “The Mother to her
Son”, also explores the theme of valour and courage. The following
extract echoes the clarion call of Mother India to her children:

Shrink not from a noble action, stoop not to
unworthy deed!/ Vile are they who stoop, they gain not Heaven’s doors, nor here
succeed ~ When thou winnest difficult victory from the clutch of fearful
strife, I shall know thou art my offspring and shall love my son indeed.

The notion of the
Nation as Mother seemed a natural continuation of Swami Vivekananda’s evocation
of the goddess in the poem “Kali the Mother”. Written in Kashmir
in 1898, the poem was composed during his pilgrimage to Kshir Bhavani… Both
Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo advocated a massive upheaval for the
spiritual resurgence of the country and Shiva serves as a triumphant symbol of
such a spiritual revival. (To be concluded) The writer is on the faculty of the
Department of English, St Xavier’s College, Kolkata

That the Hazare campaign enjoys complete support of
the Hindutva brigade is not hidden from anyone. With such a backdrop, how far
it is justified to endorse the same in the public domain? [TNM55] by Tusar
N. Mohapatra on Sun 04 Sep 2011 08:56 PM IST | Profile | Permanent
Link

I was wary of my comment being deleted, and hence,
couldn't put it clearly. I'm not against anyone supporting or opposing Hazare.
My concern is whether we the readers of the Mirror should follow this advisory?
(although it was late in the day) [TNM55] by Tusar
N. Mohapatra on Wed 07 Sep 2011 01:08 PM IST | Profile | Permanent
Link

If you say I don't take tea, there is every
likelihood of someone asking why. Coalitions, similarly, have lately become so
common that the will for taking uncompromising positions has dwindled. But, we
have no such compulsions at the moment, and hence, may march alone. [TNM55]

by Sandeep on Fri 07 Aug 2009 08:29 PM
IST | Profile | Permanent
Link Tusar,
The questions were meant for public discussion. You may answer the first two
questions at leisure but I am more interested in the reservation issue which is
corrupting the education system. It needs to be replaced by another system
which addresses the historical inequities without sacrificing merit.

Unless you have the "pull" to change those
laws at the Centre, I don't see any merit in having a private conversation :)

While I understand and appreciate the leverage that a political position - a
position of power - can provide for greater action, I am convinced that there
is a lot that can be done in an apolitical setup. In fact a lot is being done
by apolitical organizations (NGOs, spiritual organisations etc). My experience
has been that Govt bureaucracy and interference can impede and retard the work.
RYD,
I believe the villages need to be given attention. The major thrust of the
effort ought to be there. It is not only for amelioration of the conditions of
living but the immense potential that exists in the youth. I have been
wonder-struck by the reservoir of raw talent. It is simply amazing to watch
teens fixing tractors and repairing sophisticated mechanical equipment with
absoutely no formal training. Then the genuine warmth and simplicity of the
people is deeply touching. One is truly humbled and quickly reminded of the
first part of the Uttarpara speech.

Savitri
Era: SP to SEPThe Anna Hazare movement could have thrown a new
party, but they developed cold feet. Savitri Era Party gaining
popularity is a long term ...